Area Majority / Influence

A War of Whispers is a competitive board game for 2 to 4 players. Five mighty empires are at war for the world, but you are no mighty ruler. Instead, you play a secret society that is betting on the results of this war while pulling strings to rig the results and ensure their bets pay off. A War of Whispers is a game of deep strategy, hidden agendas, and shifting loyalties.

You start the game with five loyalty tokens, each corresponding to one of the five different empires, bet randomly on a loyalty value. Your primary goal is to ensure that when the game ends, the empires you are most loyal to control the most cities across the globe. Gameplay consists of turns broken down into four phases:

Deploy agents phase: In player order (starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise), each player removes, then deploys agents to empire councils, the positions on the board marked Sheriff, Steward, Marshall, and Chancellor.
Empire turns phase: Each council position on each empire council will take an action. If a player has acquired cards, they may play them during this phase.
Cleanup phase: Add the turn marker to the next space on the turn tracker, then each player discards down to the hand limit of five cards.
Swap phase: In player order, each player may swap two of their unrevealed loyalty tokens. If you choose to do so, you must reveal both of the swapped loyalty tokens. They remain revealed for the rest of the game.

Gameplay repeats itself in this order four times. When the last space on the turn track is filled, the game ends immediately and scoring commences. The player with the most points based off their empire loyalties and the cities they control wins.

Darkness is a strategy card game set in ancient Northern Europe where druids vie for control of powerful artifacts. It's a simultaneous action game where players play a progressing amount of colored cards in order to acquire unclaimed artifacts and relics, in a complex, and fun game of prediction, observation, and thought.

Game play takes place over the course of six rounds. In each round player try to acquire cards that give them end game points, and special abilities. The objective of the game is to score the most points at the end.

Each round is separated into four phases. In the first phase, players place three of their colored cards from their hand in front of them, face down. Then everybody reveals their cards.

Next, everybody places two cards down in front of them, and then reveals those. Then players play one final card face down and reveal that one, for a total of six revealed cards. Finally, there is a resolution phase where the players determine who has the largest amount of dominant, and sub-dominant colors for each of the available artifacts, and they are divided up accordingly.

Players have the same hand of 15 cards throughout the course of the game, thus limited luck. The 15 cards a comprised of five colors, with three cards of each color. Once a card is played during a round, it is put back in a player's hand at the end of the round and can be played again.

On each artifact card this is a dominant, and sub-dominant color. The card goes to the player that has played the most color cards that match the dominant color. In the case of a tie, the player with the largest number of color cards played that match the sub-dominant color gets the card. The reason the game is complex and fun is, there are many different dominant and sub colors on the board at the same time, and people have to predict what other people are going for based on set collection, and the optimization of color specialization.

The game ends after six rounds. The person who wins is the person with the most number of points, which is determined by how much of a type a player has in each of their sets, and how many gem relics they have.

Control worker bees to build a beehive, collect nectar, and make honey while also being efficient and strategic to outmanoeuvre your opponents. This 1-4 player Euro-style worker-placement dice game has stunning artwork and broad appeal. There are many paths to a sweet victory - it’s every beehive for themselves!

Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game is a worker placement game that puts 1-5 players inside a plant cell, where they will compete over limited resources in order to undergo photosynthesis, produce carbohydrates, and build the cell wall. With everyone vying for the same actions, players must time their use of proteins, hormones, and cell component cards in order to diversify their strategies and outplay the competition.

Cellulose is the standalone sequel to Cytosis (2017). It has some of the same DNA, but Cellulose expands familiar game systems, allowing players greater control over available resources, strategic paths, and even game length.

—description from the publisher

Set in ancient Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization, at a time when the location of Ur was a coastal region, players work to build the Great City of Ur, expand its districts, and establish themselves as powerful builders.

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur features a stunning board showing the city of Ur divided into 5 regions, each tied to a specific color die. There are 3 building districts, 1 temple district, and 1 port district.

Each turn, your worker will activate one of these districts. When activating a district, you must first take a die from the district. This die matches the color of the district and serves two functions:

1) The die itself becomes a resource of its color.
2) The value of the die determines which district your worker will activate on the following turn.

Through various actions you will be able to expand your influence in the various districts, expanding construction sites and turning them into buildings to score valuable victory points. But you will also exert your influence in the temple district in order to earn the king's favor. In the port district you can obtain ships with important abilities and for scoring victory points.

You must spend your actions wisely and always make sure that you keep an eye on the general timing of the game. The moment a district is emptied of dice, a scoring will occur.

—description from publisher